Leadership

Dr. Britta Erickson is an independent scholar and curator. Her doctoral dissertation investigates patronage modes in the career of the mid-nineteenth-century Shanghai School master, Ren Xiong. She has curated major exhibitions at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Word Play: Contemporary Art by Xu Bing) and the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford (On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West). In 2007 she co-curated the Chengdu Biennial, which focused on ink art, and in 2010 she was a contributing curator for Shanghai: Art of the City (Asian Art Museum, San Francisco). Dr. Erickson has written numerous books, articles, and essays on contemporary Chinese art and has produced a series of documentary films about ink painting entitled The Enduring Passion for Ink. Ms. Erickson is on the advisory boards of The Ink Society (Hong Kong) and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (Beijing), as well as the editorial boards of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art and ART Asia Pacific. In 2006 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Beijing on the Chinese contemporary art market. Dr. Erickson received her Ph. D. in Chinese Art History from Stanford University. 

Rick Fabian, along Donald Schell, co-founded St. Gregory of Nyssa a progressive Episcopalian congregation in San Francisco. In 1965, he graduated from Yale with a B.A. summa cum laude and Honors with Exceptional Distinction in Chinese Studies and in 1970 from Cambridge with a M.A. in History, 1967. S.T.B. & M.Div. General Theological Seminary.  From 1970-1976, he served as Episcopal Chaplain at Yale and from 1978-2010 as Rector at St Gregory Nyssen Church, San Francisco and has served on the Boards of the charitable nonprofits All Saints Company and the San Francisco Early Music Society. As a writer and composer, Reverend Fabian has composed music for the Episcopal Church Hymnal series, articles for Chinese painting exhibitions in 2000 and 2008 and articles in Church periodicals seriatim.  In 2019, he published Signs of Life: Worship for a Just and Loving People. 

Susie Ferrell is an Assistant Curator in the Chinese Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), with a specialty in contemporary Chinese art. She joined LACMA in late 2016, and has been working closely with the Gérard and Dora Cognié Collection. Over the past few years, Susie has co-curated The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China at LACMA, and led the installation of Zeng Fanzhi's Untitled and Zhu Jinshi's Wave of Materials. Her joint essay with Dr. Britta Erickson, Yang Jiechang: 100 Layers of Ink, 100 Layers of Action was published in Yishu in March 2018; additionally, she is the editor of a 2019 film on the same artist, entitled Let Us Make Our Appeal to the Infinite, and a contributing editor on The Enduring Passion for Ink, a film series on contemporary Chinese ink art. Susie holds a master's in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute in London, where she researched Cultural Revolution-era and contemporary Chinese art.

Dr. Little is Florence and Harry Sloan Curator of Chinese Art, and Head, Chinese, Korean, and South & Southeast Asian Departments at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). An authority on Asian art, Stephen Little grew up in Southeast Asia and the Near East. He received his BA from Cornell University (1975), MA from UCLA (1977), and PhD from Yale University (1987). He served as Curator of Chinese Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (1977–1982) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (1987–1989); Curator of Asian Art at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (1989–1994); Pritzker Curator of Asian Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (1995–2002); and Director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts (2003–2010) before coming to LACMA in 2011. His research interests include Chinese and Japanese painting, Chinese and Korean calligraphy, Chinese ceramics, and the classical arts of Southeast Asia. His publications include Chinese Ceramics of the Transitional Period (1983), Visions of the Dharma: Japanese Buddhist Paintings and Prints in the Honolulu Academy of Arts (1991), Spirit Stones of China (1999), Taoism and the Arts of China (2000; with Shawn Eichman), View of the Pinnacle: Japanese Lacquer Writing Boxes—The Lewis Collection of Suzuribako (2012), Chinese Paintings from Japanese Collections (2014), 17th-Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection (2016), Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing (2019), and Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying (2020). He was awarded the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Taoism and the Arts of China in 2002, and the Art Libraries Society of North America’s George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award for 17th-Century Chinese Paintings from the Tsao Family Collection in 2016. Between 2003 and 2008 he led an international team that organized the first exhibition to explore the Vajrayana Buddhist art of Bhutan: The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan (2008). Little has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Chicago, the University of London, Harvard University, Occidental College, and UCLA.

Xiong Wei is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Chengdu, Sichuan, China.  She currently serves as the executor of Li Huasheng's estate.  She was previously the Executive Director of the Chengdu Blue Roof Art Museum. Her work has been exhibited in Beijing, China (2019, 2020), New York, USA (2018), Taipei, Taiwan (2017), Los Angeles, USA (2017), Bonn, Germany (2016), Lisbon, Portugal (2016) and Madrid, Spain (2016). 

Craig L. Yee is founding director of INKstudio, a Beijing-based gallery and experimental art space devoted to documenting and exhibiting China’s leading contemporary ink artists. Mr. Yee has played a central organizational role in a number of major university and museum research projects on classical Chinese painting including New Songs on Ancient Tunes (2007) at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Selected Masterworks of Modern Chinese Painting (2010) at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and Alternative Dreams (2016) a multi-year research and exhibition program on seventeenth-century Chinese painting at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has co-edited monographs in the University of Hawaii Press Modern Ink Series including The Art of Qi Baishi (2015), The Art of Xugu (2015), and The Art of Wu Changshi (2018) and has published monographs in the D.A.P. Contemporary Ink Series including Zheng Chongbin: Impulse Matter Form (2014) and Chen Haiyan: Carving the Unconcsious (2016).

Previously, Mr. Yee was one of the architects of the San Francisco HIV/AIDS service model targeting Asian and Pacific Islanders in high-risk communities, organizational consultant for regional non-profits and foundations, and healthcare strategy consultant for McKinsey & Company in New York.  He received dual bachelor’s degrees in economics and symbolic systems (1989) and a masters degree (2003) from Stanford University.

Alan Yeung is an independent art historian and curator. He has co-curated solo exhibitions of Tai Xiangzhou, Wei Ligang, and Yang Jiechang with Britta Erickson. He curated the group exhibition Luminous Shadows, which explored spirituality and transcendence in the sensory engagement with the material world; and Flesh and Bone, a major retrospective on Li Jin’s artistic formation in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly the profound impact of his self-exiles in Tibet. Alan received his M.A. in art history from Harvard University. His ongoing doctoral dissertation is on the Qing-dynasty ink artist Bada Shanren, on whom he has presented at Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He also has a background in ethnographic filmmaking and has filmed numerous short documentaries on contemporary ink artists including Li Huasheng.

Zheng Chongbin was educated as a classical Chinese figurative painter at the elite China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he taught for four years after graduation in 1984. Acclaimed as one of China’s preeminent young experimental ink painters in the 1980's, he mounted his first solo exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Art in 1988. In 1989, he received a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute to study installation, performance, and conceptual art, receiving his MFA in 1991. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for over three decades, Zheng is inspired by the region's distinctive atmospheric and environmental effects and rich ecologies, as well as by the California light and space movement. His work is part of the permanent collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the British Museum, London, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, M+ Museum, Hong Kong S.A.R., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, and the Power Station of Art, Shanghai amongst others.